Struggling to Pass

By Elizabeth Judd

Published: March 17, 2002

THE FALL OF ROME

By Martha Southgate.

223 pp. New York:

Scribner. $23.

By now, fiction that addresses race or sex in the cloistered laboratory of the American private school constitutes its own literary subgenre, a spinoff from the traditional academic novel. With debates raging about marginalized writers and the canon, generational shifts in attitudes and idioms and the spectacle of fierce battles pitched over ludicrously small stakes, the setup is as morbidly fascinating as a scab on a scraped knee.

It's tempting to argue that Philip Roth's formidably intelligent novel ''The Human Stain'' represents the final literary word on race and education, but Martha Southgate's intriguing novel ''The Fall of Rome'' proves that the subject is apparently inexhaustible. Southgate revels in the ironies of the genre, setting her characters at the Chelsea School, an idyllic all-male prep school with lush grounds and handsome boys, a campus full of ''clichés brought to life.'' Harvard-educated Jerome Washington, the only classicist and Negro (his term) on the faculty, believes his success should serve as an inspiration to others, ''a testament to the notion that we are not all cut from the same cloth, that individual effort and rigor will ultimately win out over all.'' His smugness is threatened by the arrival of Jana Hansen, an idealistic white English teacher, and Rashid Bryson, an ambitious African-American teenager from Brooklyn whom Washington immediately dislikes for his having dreadlocks and ''one of those rather absurd African-inspired names.'' The three narrate their own versions of events in alternating chapters.

Southgate has written a slightly schizophrenic novel -- it's part polemic, part romance. Rashid functions as the designated mouthpiece for the alienation that urban blacks experience at elite schools. He sees Chelsea as ''a foreign country,'' is embarrassed by his spotty education (he has never heard of Freud) and loses interest in running competitively after overhearing a classmate remark: ''It's just natural with him. . . . You know, running from the cops and guns.'' Southgate seasons her arguments with elements of private drama; for instance, she saddles Rashid with an additional psychological burden -- grief over the loss of a talented older brother who was killed in a hold-up -- that makes him incapable of sleeping through the night or concentrating on schoolwork.

Polemicists often make uninspired writers, and Southgate does have a distinct fondness for wooden expressions and overly schematic plotting. Jana's sections tend to read like bumper stickers strung together in schoolgirlish journal entries. In a chapter entitled ''They Say That It's a Man's World (But You Can't Prove That by Me),'' she's ''tired of fighting the tide'' and dismisses her sexual attraction to Washington as a ''fast train to total despair.'' Rashid's sad past finds a dispiritingly literal equivalent in Washington's own dead brother, and the tightly constructed story eventually bogs down in a protracted scandal over the harsh grading of Rashid's Latin midterm. Rashid and his friends scurry around comparing marks in scenes that feel adolescent, reminding us that Southgate published a novel for young adults, ''Another Way to Dance,'' in 1996. False steps notwithstanding, Washington's chillingly controlled voice redeems ''The Fall of Rome.''

Stoic and consummately self-restrained, Washington lives according to a credo based on honor, professional accomplishment and supreme rationality. He sees Chelsea as racially egalitarian despite all evidence to the contrary, but cannot make sense of the indignities and contradictions that this view entails. In this powerful yet uneven book, Washington achieves a tragic grandeur as he inches painfully close to real human connection with Jana, only to fall back on his delusions and emotional inaccessibility. Washington is a creation of such epic pride and blindness -- an American version of the self-effacing butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's ''Remains of the Day'' -- that you wish Southgate had skipped the canned dramas and let her repressed hero do all the talking.